The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

by Laura Pearson

‘When you’re young and you’re a woman,’ I say, ‘everyone’s interested in you. In what you look like and what you’ve got to say. And then there’s a point in your life, around fifty or so, when it all stops and you become invisible. And it’s stupid, really, because by then you have much more interesting things to contribute to the conversation, but no one wants to hear them. I’ve come to terms with it,

You should try everything. You won’t regret it. It’s so different from the way I’ve lived my life. But I’m starting to think it’s right.

Do you remember it, Mabel? All the emotions. God, I don’t miss being young.’ I do. I remember it, but unlike Julie, I do miss it. The way my body moved however and wherever I wanted it to, the way I felt like there was more life ahead than behind, the way people noticed me.

The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer. You carry each loved one you lose, and they stack up, and it becomes unbearable.

You can’t live in the past, I tell myself, but you can visit. And you can bring bits of it into the present, when you need them.

think we’re all grieving for something. Our childhoods or a relationship or a dream.’

Don’t people always want to talk about the people they loved? Don’t they always want those people to live on through shared stories and memories?

There are different kinds of love, aren’t there? Patty’s big love is her daughter, mine was my sister, yours is Dot. I’m not sure about Kirsty or Erin yet. Maybe they’re too young to know.

‘Oh Mabel, flowers make me feel hopeless. They just remind me that everything dies.’

We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed.

I notice again how beautiful she is. I wish I could see her modelling, the way she looked when she was in her teens and twenties. But perhaps she’s at her most beautiful now, with all this life behind her, all this wisdom.